How Much is Inside a Can of Tuna Fish?

I believed that for tuna to get the top billing on the ingredient list, the can had to be more than half tuna, by weight.

By Rob Cockerham | June 2, 2013

How much is inside a Can of Tuna Fish?

I forget sometimes that it is unusual to have a precise scale at home. You know, unless you are in the psychoactive weed business. I should use my scale more often, and I should post the results.

Before I fell out of love with Walmart, I scored a box of small tuna cans for 50¢ each. They sometimes sell for twice that amount, so I thought it was an excellent bargain. It was so great a deal that I began to suspect that it had been too good to be true.

Although the cans were labelled "5 ounces" I knew that some of that weight was the water it was canned with.

I believed that for tuna to get the top billing on the ingredient list, the can had to be more than half tuna, by weight.

One night at dinner, I brought out the scale.

Here's what I found. The drained tuna weighed 2.1 ounces. The water weighed 2.9 ounces.

Whoa. Two ounces of tuna?

Even at 50¢ a can, I felt ripped off.

How could the tuna get top billing on the ingredient list when the water is more than half of the can? Shouldn't it be Water with Tuna, instead of the other way around?

A close inspection of the can revealed the labelling trick which I'd been fooled by. There were three ingredients: Tuna, water and broth! Instead of tuna having to be more than half of the weight, a third ingredient meant that it only had to be more than a third of the weight.

Tuna still makes up the largest % of the total! Taa Daa!

Broth, however, doesn't strike me as an ingredient which can be defined separately from water. The main ingredient of broth is water. These cans shouldn't treat water as a separate ingredient from broth!

What they are doing is nearly the same as labelling hot water and cold water seperately. Ridiculous. If we let this one slide, pretty soon we are going to get cans of tuna with nine kinds of water inside.

If this keeps up, you'll have to go fishing for the tuna in these cans!